Movie notes: NC-17 rated ‘Shame’ opens in S.A.

Here’s something you don’t see every week. In fact, it’s something you don’t see every year — a film with the dreaded NC-17 rating (no one under 17 admitted) opening in San Antonio.

That would be “Shame,” starring Golden Globe nominee Michael Fassbender as a sex addict. It opens today at the Santikos Bijou.

A quick search through our archives indicated that “Shame” is the first NC-17 movie to open locally since Ang Lee’s provocative “Lust, Caution” in 2007. There are a lot of reasons for that, mostly financial and logistical; more on that in a sec.

For the record, “Shame,” which opened in some markets in December, is getting good reviews. Its Tomatometer score is 80. Its Rotten Tomatoes consensus is: “Boasting stellar performances by Michael Fassbender and Carey Mulligan, ‘Shame’ is a powerful plunge into the mania of addiction affliction.”

In other words, it’s not exactly a feel-good movie. Roger Ebert gave it four stars but added, “I don’t believe I would be able to see it twice.” So folks expecting a nonstop sex party will be sorely disappointed. Brandon, Fassbender’s character, gets no pleasure from his addiction — it’s presented as a burdensome compulsion borne of childhood trauma that separates him from the rest of the world.

A failed attempt to set a boundary line between serious works with adult themes and hardcore porn, NC-17 used to be a subject of controversy. Created in 1990 to replace the X rating, it has faded into near irrelevance, thanks to the explosion of the home video market.

So the appearance of ”Shame” is now more of a curiosity, like spotting an ivory-billed woodpecker or some other nearly extinct species.

NC-17 was created by the ratings body, the secretive Motion Picture Association of America, as an attempt to correct a serious error when the current system was begun in 1968 — the failure to copyright the X rating like it did G, M (for Mature, which evolved into PG and later PG-13) and R. The adult-film industry soon co-opted X, meaning it was quickly associated with porn and not mainstream fare like “Midnight Cowboy” (the only X-rated film to win the Best Picture Oscar), “Last Tango in Paris” and “A Clockwork Orange.”

The thought was that a market would open up for NC-17 films that wasn’t there for X. It didn’t happen. Major studios still mostly refused to release NC-17 movies; major video chains wouldn’t stock them (some even did their own unauthorized edits); and lots of major national movie chains wouldn’t show them (Santikos, a local chain, is the only one that shows them in San Antonio).

So it’s no surprise that NC-17 movies aren’t exactly financial pleasures. The top-grossing NC-17 movie, the infamous “Showgirls” (1995), was a major flop, earning only $20 million, which scared off studios. (Historical note: It also made the cover of Weekender when it came out, mainly because of the novelty of a mainstream NC-17 film).

Anyway, volumes have been written about the unwieldy, untransparent and possibly corrupt MPAA system (the consensus is its raters like big studios over indies and are far more sensitive to sex than violence — a sentiment brought to light in the documentary expose “This Film Is Not Yet Rated” in 2006).

But these days, it almost doesn’t matter. Almost anything is available by streaming services. Meanwhile, studios have devised a two-tiered strategy — they offer R-rated versions to multiplexes and release the original uncut versions on video.

And some indies and foreign flicks (like the excellent Mexican flick “Y tu mama tambien”) are simply released unrated to avoid the trouble.

The MPAA’s head-scratching system doesn’t stop with NC-17. Since those films are scarce, far more critical and controversial decisions are made along the murky boundary between PG-13 and R. Two of my favorite movies of the past few years, “The King’s Speech” and “Once,” were given R ratings despite having no sex or violence; a couple of scenes involving the f-word were the culprits. Meanwhile, PG-13 movies routinely feature R-rated plots with just enough nudity, violence and profanity removed to qualify for the less restrictive rating, which means a bigger potential box office.

In a piece he wrote for the Wall Street Journal in 2010 after “Blue Valentine” had its NC-17 rescinded on appeal (wthout any cuts to the film), Ebert pointed out that the system was simply outdated and unworkable. He wrote:

“Perhaps only three categories are needed: ‘G,’ for young audiences, ‘T’ for teenagers, and ‘A’ for adults. These categories would be not be keyed to specific content but would reflect the board’s considered advice about a film’s gestalt and intended audience. At a time when literally any content can find its way into most American homes, what’s the point of singling out theatrical films?”